The field of this invention relates in general to a semi-automatic method for detecting new ideas in a domain of endeavor or field of study based on the occurrence of a word, symbol, acronym, abbreviation, or nickname which has previously not appeared in the lexicon of words associated with that domain. It also relates to internet web and generic text or symbolic search methods.
The original motivation for this invention is the difficulty which businesses have in detecting new ideas while they are still fresh and exploitable in the sense of creating opportunities to capture an emerging market while it is still growing and before it has become saturated with competitors. Although there are significant amounts of data in the media, on the internet and world wide web (WWW), and manufacturers' literature, current search engines are designed to locate and categorize ideas that are already there and well established. No engines are designed to automatically search the web and detect new ideas as they emerge. Furthermore there are no search engines which detect the spread of a new idea and automatically detect the transition of a new idea from its faddish stage which is usually exploitable only by its originator to its category stage in which it is exploitable by a variety of other related and unrelated businesses.
Another difficulty which precludes the use of current search engines for new idea detection is that existing search engines do not differentiate between new ideas and new documents. There is so much data created within a domain, that even if a search engine were to detect all new documents within a domain, a knowledgeable reader must spend inordinate amounts of time reading and analyzing the documents in order to detect truly new and novel ideas which are relatively few and far between. It is also possible that a knowledgeable reader may be scanning documents and miss a new idea because it is indexed incorrectly, or the wrong keywords do not attract his attention. There is a need for a system which doggedly pursues all documents within a domain and detects new ideas within those documents.
While this concept was initially developed for business management, the technique is equally applicable to searching any domain of endeavor or field of study to detect when new ideas occur. The technique can be applied to any field in which there is communication between individuals because a necessary and fundamental reason why this lexicon-based approach works is that new ideas, of necessity, require a label else the idea cannot be effectively communicated. Law enforcement and intelligence collection is currently unable to have human operators analyze all documents and communications that it has collected and therefore has a need to automatically process many documents in order to extract those documents which should be analyzed in detail by human operators. This lexicon-based approach can detect the introduction of new ideas into the communications between individuals whose conversations or mails are being monitored.